Movies with staying power: a look at what makes a classic porn

By now, it’s likely you’ve already hungrily devoured our feature covering the Golden Age of Geek Porn, as well as many other articles detailing our love and respect for the pornographic genre – in which case, you have already accepted pornography as a legitimate entry in critical film discussion, unashamedly removed your copy of Deep Throat from its hiding place under your bed and proudly displayed it on your DVD shelf next to Big Bang Theory (which, apparently, is the name of a TV show).

In short, you do not need me to to reiterate that porn ought to be taken seriously, or that the best of them can too be considered classics.

What makes a classic porn?

But what makes a classic porn film? In spite of its constant struggle against backlash and controversy, how have the best of the pornographic genre carved out a niche for themselves in cultural memory, with their own classy sounding label to boot (Porno Chic)? Just for the hell of it, I did a quick Google search to see if there existed an adult film version of the Oscars – there is. They’re called the AVNAs, short for the Adult Video News Awards, and they shrare many of the same honours as their more PG-rated cousin, including Best Screenplay, Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, and Best Spanking. (Okay, all but that last one.) At first glance, it would seem like the criteria necessary to immortalize oneself alongside the Pornographic Hall of Fame would be obvious.

However, upon closer inspection, many of these awards are vague or completely inconsequential: what exactly is meant by “best male perfomer? After all, if we’re judging by the lazy ecstasy of the partner, maybe we ought to be giving him/her the award. Further, it is odd that the period generally known as the Golden Age of Porn — which gave us the aformentioned Deep Throat, as well as Behind the Green Door and Debbie Does Dallas — is generally considered to have ended around 1982-83, the year before the AVNAs were founded. Clearly, these two developments marked a shift in pornographic history. Something was left behind as pornography moved into the online age, and proceeded to flood the internet with capsule films and vignettes, five-minute scenes that wasted no time in taking us from foreplay to climax — an unsatisfying thing, really, because as we all know, it’s all about the foreplay.

It’s all about the politics

The films of the 70s are classic porn specifically because they give us foreplay, in the sense that they reflect the context in which the films themselves were created. Films of that period are rooted in specific social and cultural moments, and I argue that the reach of those moments extended to the porno industry as well, whether manifested in the beliefs of the actors, or as motifs found within the films themselves. I doubt that Deep Throat ‘s choice to place the woman’s clitoris in her speaking orifice during a time of women’s struggle for sexual freedom and expression is a coincidence.

Modern porn, on the other hand, isn’t rooted in much of anything. These plotless, vignette-style pornographic films that dominate the contemporary film landscape appeal to the genre’s predominantly mass male audience because, in many cases, they represent the absolute zenith of sexual encounters — guiltless, no-strings-attached sex and lusty confrontations that begin and end in the same scene, but have no meaning, no staying power beyond their fleeting, immediate existence. These are films that may have some damn good spanking in them, but don’t speak to anything greater. Instead they merely reflect the fragmented, schizophrenic culture that has come in the age of ‘on-demand’.

And the Woody goes to…

In short, it is all well and good to hand a film the “Woody” for Best Interactive DVD Menus, but all you’re really doing is congratulating someone for adding a drop to a vast ocean of porn, one that is almost certain to get lost between Dorm Room Fantasies XIV and XVIII (I made those titles up, but it’s likely they exist, given that 11,000 pornos are released to DVD every year). The classic porn, on the other hand, lays its claim to greatness on the idea that pornography is not simply a means to a wholly physical end, but rather an opportunity to make a statement on contemporary culture that’s as important or relevant as anything that can be found in mainstream cinema – or your Big Bang DVD, which, again is allegedly not a classic porn.

About The Author

Noam Kaufman is a cinephile by day, concert-goer by night. He cherishes doumentaries and foreign films, which enable him to indulge his dual love of reading and watching simultaneously. If he isn't at a concert hall or movie theater, you might be able to find him at York University, where he occasionally moonlights as a student.